Depends what you want to photograph.
A telescope isn't necessary for magnificent wide-field shots.
A tracking mount isn't needed for the moon.

OTOH - I could *easily* budget your whole $5k on just a decent equatorial
mount and drive.  IMHO, that is the item which will/could cause by far the
most grief.

To try to answer your question:
* Any telescope (doesn't matter)
* The best eq. mount you can afford. Forks are OK if you mount them on a
wedge, and use them as eq., but not otherwise. *At least* 50% of your
budget - maybe more.
* Then, piggyback your standard camera on the back of the scope.  Use the
scope to guide, not to image. Try focal lengths from wide to long tele.
(*BONUS* you can use the same lenses during the day -and- you might even own
them, already.

* Think about moving to through-the-scope imaging after you've had a ball
piggy-backing.  You will have learnt a bundle about tracking, exposures etc
etc.

Others will preach the necessity of stacking (Registrax et al).  Works for
deep, dark stuff.
Still others will advise webcams through the 'scope, and assembling montages
from .avi footage. Works for bright stuff.

In a word?  "piggyback"

--
Jeff R.

"Ken Lucke" <ken@glass-stones.com> wrote in message

Ken,

Go to alt.binaries.pictures.astro, include ASTRO in the subject line (most
there use it as an anti-spam filter) and ask your questions. They are very
knowledgeable about such things and will (should) give you excellent advice.

Bob

Consider one of the new Meade hybrid Schmidt-Cassegrains.  With it,
you'll be able to shoot deepsky (nebula, galaxies) and planetary shots.
An 8" or 10" would be a good choice, along with some compressor lenses
for higher speed, wider angle shooting.  You could also get a small
apochromat telescope from Sky Instruments, Orion, Adorama as a wide
angle highly corrected "lens."

As with photography as a hobby, astronomy things are open ended
(meaning infinite ways to spend money), so focusing
would help.

You might joining the digital_astro yahoo group. It is very
active and many great people to help in all aspects
of digital astrophotography.

Do you want to take photos of planets, or galaxies and star clusters?
Depending on which, it can steer you to different equipment.
For example, for planets you need long focal lengths, more than
4,000 mm, and a steady tracking mount.  For many galaxies and
nebulae (called deep sky), medium to long telephoto lenses
work well, but you need a tracking mount, and an auto-guider
(you can guide by hand but it is tedious and difficult).

The advantage of getting into deep sky photography with digital and
telephoto lenses, is that you then have great lenses for wildlife.
I originally bought my 500 f/4 L IS lens for astrophotography
then found what a great lens it is for all kinds of other stuff!

People are taking great astrophotos with 200 mm, 300mm  and longer
lenses.  A vary large fraction of deep sky photos
are with focal lengths less than about 1000 mm with DSLRs.

To get started, a great outfit is a low noise DSLR, and lenses
ranging from wide angle to 300mm or so.  The lowest noise DSLRs
(since you seem to be a Canon person) includes the
350D, 20D, 30D, 5D, and 1D Mark II.

A high end tracking mount is the Losmandy G11 (I have that),  It can
hold a fair amount of weight and track smoothly, and costs around
$2k.  The mount must track keeping pointing accurate to an arc-second
or so, often in a breeze, holding your camera and or telescope,
compensating for the earth's rotation.  That is no
small feat.  It must hold your camera+lens, finder scope, and
guide telescope very steadily.  As your focal length goes up,
the mount requirements go up.  A cheap mount, like a cheap
camera tripod will result in a lot of blurred pictures.

For planetary work, a DSLR is not ideal, but a simple web cam(!!!)
and a very high quality long focal length telescope.  You also need
a location with steady atmosphere.  For example, I live in Colorado
and the turbulence of the atmospheric flow over the mountains
means almost constant turbulence and poor conditions for photographing
the planets (that is one reason my plant and moon pictures below
are not the greatest).  Florida seems to have very steady skies
and some of the top planetary photographers are located in Florida.
Probably an 8-inch telescope is needed to get great planetary
photographs (although you can get something with smaller telescopes).
8-inch telescope is the aperture, so commonly an f/10 Schmidt-
Cassegrain, about $2,000, has about 2,000 mm focal length and does
a nice job.  For planetary, the web cam records a several minute
stream of video and software sorts through the thousands of images
picking the best ones and co-adding them,  The results are astonishing
and a small telescope beats large observatory images from 10 or
20 years ago.

My astrophoto examples:
  http://www.clarkvision.com/galleries/gallery.astrophoto-1

Roger

You might consider joining a local astronomy club. It may save you thousands
of dollars and give you the benefit of trying equipment you might later
consider buying. Also, consider the benefits of all that nerd-to-nerd chit
chat.

Dave